Quotes by Edmund Burke

About Edmund Burke:

Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish statesman born in Dublin, as well as an author, orator, political theorist, and philosopher, who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." [Preface to (1794)]

Edmund Burke

The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.

Edmund Burke

But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

Edmund Burke

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.

Edmund Burke

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Edmund Burke

If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how...

Edmund Burke

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

Edmund Burke

What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than t...

Edmund Burke

It is not, what a lawyer tells me I do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.

Edmund Burke

The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from principle, in all parts of the empire; not p...

Edmund Burke

The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.

Edmund Burke

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Edmund Burke

The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.

Edmund Burke

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is...

Edmund Burke

It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.

Edmund Burke

Good order is the foundation of all things.

Edmund Burke

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Edmund Burke

Society is indeed a contract. ... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.

Edmund Burke

The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.

Edmund Burke

But when the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the pe...

Edmund Burke

Author Bio

  • NameEdmund Burke
  • DescriptionAnglo-Irish statesman
  • BornJanuary 12, 1729
  • DiedJuly 9, 1797
  • CountryIreland
  • ProfessionPolitician; Philosopher; Writer